The Tale of Love and Friendship
by Cowardly-fangirl
Summary: His love, the sun of his life, faded into a ravenous a void, eating away at the stars in his eyes and the cosmos beneath his skin. She was a demanding galaxy and he, mere nebular dust.. (England-centric; no major ship)


Love was a flurry of colours and emotions and Arthur was damn sure it existed.

Francine was her name. Lips delicate yet firmly pursed and eyes challenging as they stood together in the lonely school halls. They both were victims of their own arrogant ways.  
To him, his peevish habits debilitated him whist her charm backfired upon herself.  
The flare or her skirts and the silkiness of her blouse were maddening and her kind smile was sweetly toxic. They stood in the lonely land of paper people and brick walls; metallic furniture and flawed dynamics. Two perfectly imperfect outsiders they were.  
They stood together.  
They stood as one.  
I became we.  
They became us.  
In his immaculate garden, she was a violet rose and he a neighbourly daisy. Her beauty layered and elegant; refined with class yet dangerously jagged in an attempt of self-preservation. He on the other hand was daisy- simplistic and resoundingly mediocre. His beauty was limited to the blossoms of violet roses.

His garden slowly died from the ground up, though. Beauty slowly sapped by the deficient, dead soil. The flora wilted; fauna fell and weeds sprouted. The naturalistic paradise of his own garden was lost to decay.  
His rose garden rotted into a gaping space of soil.  
The daisy was forced to watch.

His lover was a vermin which scoured the divine threshold of his body and mind, leaving behind an empty shell, bruised and distraught.

But perhaps his garden was but a patch of deficient land?  
In his earnestly optimistic soul, he found the power to live and carry on with the world.  
He left the world of paper people and failed love; brick walls and tarnished furniture for bustling world of promising futures and vast lecture rooms; imposing adult life and mindless obligations.  
Through the heartache he continued on.  
He continued to breath, sleep and eat, filling the void with studying and music, unwittingly prolonging the heartache. He lived through the explosion of assessed papers and exams; the rat race known as university; and the continuous reminder of the past which grew from an agape laceration to a jagged scar of discoloured skin.  
And through it all- through the mess and tireless work of tertiary education, he found _her.  
_ Vibrant red locks and demanding emerald eyes guided him. Searing eyes _commanded _him. Thus, his garden became a land of dancing flickers and warm light.  
Her eye's gentle glow was soothing and cosy; her rosy cheeks just that kissable.  
He was intertwined in her ambers and loving it- loving _her._

The flames grew too hot, though.  
He was now suffocating.  
Her warmth was uncomfortable and overbearing; her flames taunting and famishing.  
He was trapped in her furnace. No longer did he crave the delectable hue of her lipstick or the warmth of her embrace. His love, the sun of his life, faded into a ravenous a void, eating away at the stars in his eyes and the cosmos beneath his skin. She was a demanding galaxy and he, mere nebular dust.  
She was a raging inferno, setting his mind ablaze, igniting his lungs and guiding his synapses to crackle with electric heat.

Under the veil of evening, though, he felt his mind cool, lungs deflate and synapses numb; his stars combust and cosmos cease to exist within his frail human body. No longer was the buzz of her warmth his morphine.  
No longer was he a self-medicated fool.

Lured by her blazing eyes and delicate locks, he was beckoned into her fiery touch.  
She burned him, though.  
Scar tissue littered his body at her deadly touch.  
She was fire, she was warmth; she was the crackle of a bonfire and the imposing heat of a sauna.  
She was fire and he was ice.  
To her flames, he melted.  
To the enticing inferno he became mute vapours of water.

She was flames.  
He was ice.

The cold brought weakness, ice was useless and utterly un-quenching and his frost bitten heart was not enough for her fiery desire. He was not enough.  
In her hell fire, he was a mere cinder.  
He was not the one; he was the one amongst an army.

Love was not real.  
He knew that now.

He sat on the marble bench top in the early hours of the morning, a bitter cup of coffee clasped in his pale hands. The marble slate of which was his temporary seat seemed to transfer it's coolness to his bare legs which prickled with tendrils of numbness. He sat within the nocturnal domain of the kitchen, the once steaming hot beverage cold and undoubtedly undrinkable at it had been for the past few hours in which he remained stationary as stagnant darkness beneath his eyes metastasised through his blue veins in the very dull land between day and night. In the solidary silence, the darkness' toxins seeped into his beating heart, transforming it into a dull, icy cavity. He was no longer a part of her furnace but a relentless self-serving blizzard: a manifestation of the world's callous ways.

Perhaps love was fake but friendship, not so?  
His fiery love faded to scar tissue and his blue rose remained but a thorn in his heel.  
He turned from love for it did not exist.  
Friendship, though-  
it was friendship which ruined him.  
He should never have said hello.  
He should not have reciprocated the (in his opinion) faux friendliness.  
Never should he have befriended Feliciano Vargas.

His friend- his trusted companion was a fleeting summer breeze. The younger fellow brought warmth to his cold hands. His friend, Feliciano, sprouted meadows upon his pale ever cold wrists. To the pasty, freckled man, his friend was a warm Mediterranean breeze amidst dismal London rain.  
Friends but so much more; not-quite- lovers but something else.  
He loved it though. Arthur loved and hated how he revelled in the affectionate pats and hugs from his enigmatic friend.  
It was a friendship which blurred the metropolitan prison around him to a costal meadow of the coast of Sicily or the tediously grey business setting to the vast cannels of Venice.  
Oh how he loved the young Italian's stories of his home country.  
Oh how he loved Feliciano's voice.  
Oh how he loved him.

Warm hand, kind smiles and carefree chuckles they shared. Heartfelt words, poetry born of companionship danced through his mind, deceiving him- weakening his frosty soul.  
Thawing his burned, frozen, impaled heart.  
Feliciano was a warm summer's breeze.  
He was a warm embrace which fled at the same speed at which it came.  
He was the summer breeze whilst he, a miserable English state which received the breeze but once before it disappeared forever.

He was no longer a daisy but an independent weed which systematically purged the fauna beside him- no longer a garden of paradise but arid wilderness; he was neither ice nor flames and was not at any time a flower within the summer wind.  
Arthur Kirkland was human.  
He was broken.  
He was burned, frozen and tossed but would heal over time.  
He was not a garden.  
He was not the winter's wrath.  
He was not an inanimate piece of land.  
Arthur Kirkland was a man who firmly believed that friendship was a fallacy and love was a farce.

* * *

-End.

**Author's Notes: **Funny story: today my dear friend Lucy was chatting to me about the impending work she had for her English tutor. The prompt was 'Friendship is not real'. Now, inspired by the prompt, I used that as an excuse to write this. Amazingly, this is the first thing I have updated in months despite it being an impromptu piece so I'm terribly sorry to my followers! It took me eight hours to write this so I apologize for any grammar mistakes. Additionally it would also be proper of me to apologize for the rubbish quality of this as I was experimenting writing styles using this. Anyway, it's 3:10am so I guess I should sleep.

Oh and also, shout out to Lucy for being hella as always.

**Fanfic Notes: **Probably a little out of character so I'm sorry. Francine is nyo!France and the red head beauty is a mystery (they were in fact filler characters to further the writing style experiment) so my apologies to the nyotalia fandom for the character's lack of depth as this was more word building than plot building. Oh and also, I wish for you all to interpret Arthur and Feli's relationship how you want. I am merely the writer whilst you are all the important readers after all!

I'm terribly exhausted so I bid you all good night and thank you for reading this tedious piece.

**Disclaimer: **In no way do I own Hetalia or its characters.

**Warnings: **None that particularly strikes me as warning worthy but I shall rate it as teen just in case.


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